Jamaica: How I wrote the story, if you read the story, is that I was making fun of … what we now call -- I didn't have this word for it at the time -- white privilege. The idea of, first of all, of these well-off girls who had lived comfortably some place in New Jersey. They were white. They had nothing in their lives, really. They would look for something wrong. There was something never really wrong. The wrong was an invention. In my story, I was making fun of the nothingness that was in the [Nancy Drew] books.

Jamaica: I didn't know that people still wrote serious literature. I thought they just wrote penguin detective stories and romances. I didn't know that there was such a thing as writing. I must have always wanted to be an artist or something because I thought I would be a photographer. I studied photography. I began to write out the photographs. It occurred to me then that I'm a writer. I quit the college I was going to in New Hampshire, returned to New York, and started to write. The funny thing about being in America, at least in those days -- I don't know, anymore, what America is like. In those days, whatever you said you were, people said, “Oh, yes. That's what you are because you said so.” I said I was a writer. People said yes. One thing led to the other. Then I started to write for The New Yorker. It’s an improbable tale, but all too true. Every word of it is true.